Bruce Gagnon: US/NATO Missile Defense Key to First Strike

US “missile defense” is the key element in US first-strike attack planning. After the US launches a first-strike attack against a country like Russia or China they want to ensure that there is no retaliation, in effect guaranteeing a successful first-strike attack. This was stated by Bruce Gagnon the Coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space in an interview with the Voice of Russia. Mr. Gagnon is an expert in US weapons system and proliferation and has been an activist against militarization for decades. He also said that the US needs to stop spending trillions on weapons and start using the money to help deal with the reality of climate change as well as improve infrastructure if we are to have a future for our children and our grandchildren. He also reminded us of the teaching of the native Americans who believed that every decision we make has to be based on the impact to the next seven generations.

You are listening to Part II of an interview with Bruce Gagnon, the coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. You can find the previous part of this interview on our website at Voiceofrussia.com. This interview is in progress.

Robles: It’s interesting you’d mentioned that, yesterday Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of Communist Party here in Russia, was speaking on TV, he gave an interview and he said that the principles of the Catholic Church and the Church in general of humanism and caring for people are almost the same as socialist ideals.

Gagnon: If the Catholic Church would just sell all of their gold artifacts that surround the Pope that would help to be able to reduce poverty in a big way all over the planet.

Robles: Yeah. That is true. Back, if we could, to the weapons. You’ve given us some really interesting information about weapons systems. I remember you informed us about the space drones. We’re talking about hypersonic missiles and first-strike weapons and all of the stuff that is being put together in the guise of a “defensive shield”. Can you give us more details about the shield, the missiles, what is going into it and what the real dangers are?

Gagnon: So-called missile defense, this is a system that has had a long life ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton kept it alive, George Bush the second kept it going, Obama now continues it. And the funding for it has held steady and continues to grow over the years.

The whole idea of quote unquote “missile defense” in the real world: it is the key element in US first-strike attack planning, after the US launches a first-strike attack against another country like Russia or China. They want to ensure that there is no retaliation, right? The US wants a successful first-strike attack.

So by surrounding Russia and China with the so-called missile defense systems. What they do is they say: “After we hit Russia or China with a first-strike attack, they then try to fire their remaining retaliatory capability”. And the US would them pick that off, pick off that retaliatory strike with these missile defense systems.

They would be ground-based, be put right now into Poland and Romania, there are radars going into several places and then there would also be sea-based. The US is putting these missile defense systems on navy destroyers that are going to be sent into the Mediterranean, into the Baltic, into the Bering and Barents Seas.

So clearly the US intention is to, and in as many ways as possible, encircle Russia and they are doing the same thing with China, they are putting these missile defense systems on the ground and on ships in Taiwan and South Korea, in Japan, in Okinawa, in Guam.

So, they are beginning the same kind of coastal encirclement of China with these missile defense systems.

So what is Russia or China to do? Well, Russia has early said that “it is not in our interest now to reduce the number of nuclear weapons when you are creating the so-called missile defense system to essentially take out our retaliatory capability”.

So, Russia is saying “we think, we might have to step back from some of these treaties that reduce our retaliatory capability”, that of course means we’re off to new arms raise. At the same time the US is working on what they call “global strike weapons”. And these are the weapons that Putin talked about in his big speech yesterday, that would be able to go from one end of the Earth to the other in a first strike capacity but not necessarily carrying a nuclear warheads.

The US would have bunker-buster missiles, for example, and their job would be to reach the other side of the world in a very short period of time and then burrow underground and destroy underground missile silos.

When Russia sees, or China sees, these global strike weapons coming through space towards them: do they know whether they are nuclear weapons or do they know whether they are conventional warheads? No. And so it is still the same reaction necessitated by the part of the country being attacked.

So the US knows that these new global strike systems are very destabilizing and they are going to create a new arms race but that is what they want to do.

They want to do it for two reasons. Number one is they want to say: “Look, Russia and China are building up their military, they are bad. We need more, we should be afraid of them. We here in the US need more”. And that is exactly what they are saying today.

And secondly, of course, it means that we have to cut more and more social programs in the US to fund these new military programs in a way that obviously the US, its moves are helping to create these counter moves which then justify further US military expansion. It’s all a big shell game on the part of the military industrial complex.

Robles: Now; social spending in the US, I don’t think there is too much more they can actually cut, do you?

Gagnon: They are getting down to the bone, but there still is some. They are trying to privatize public education now and that means that the corporations would take over public education and they would do a corporate brainwashing, teaching children that capitalism is the “Holy Grail”.

It would become like a religion even stronger than it already is in this country. So that is one goal to continue to defund public education.

They are dying to get a hold of people’s Social Security there, the meager retirement fund that we have in this country, one of the few socialized programs we have. And they are just dying to get their hands on that money.

Robles: I thought they’ve already had.

Gagnon: Well, no. People love Social Security and people don’t want it touched. They’ve touched it but they haven’t taken it apart yet.

Robles: I see. I think it is the only security that Americans have when they get old. That is it.

Gagnon: The corporations have gone after the private pension plans, because these private pension plans get invested in Wall Street and when Wall Street goes down, people lose money in their private pension plans. And so what the capitalists want to do, what Wall Street wants to do is to get rid of self-security and move all that money into Wall Street so they can just steal it from the people.

But I have a friend who lost 40% of his retirement savings that is invested by the corporations that run these private retirement programs, it gets invested in Wall Street. He lost 40% of his life-time savings because of the shenanigans on Wall Street. This is a kind of thing that is going on today.

Robles: Have you seen anything linking NSA to space defense and NATO expansion and satellite surveillance and all that..

Gagnon: Sure it is all part of it. Two of the bigger NSA listening stations are Menwith Hill up in Yorkshire, England and Pine Gap in the outback in Australia. Those are two of the biggest US NSA spy bases and the very same bases are involved in flying drones, they are involved in espionage, both against the people of Asia or Europe and against companies, corporations in Europe for example, that are bidding against American corporations.

US is spying on those with the NSA spy base at Menwith Hill up in Northern England. And this has been brought to the EU in fact during the George W. Bush Administration, EU sent people to Washington to talk to Bush about it and he refused to meet with them to discuss this US industrial espionage. So the NSA, it is tied into all of that stuff, it is tied into surveillance, it is tied into war fighting, it is all playing the same shtick.

Robles: And it is all serving who? Just the military/ industrial/pharmaceutical/corporate/banking complex or…? What are we going to call it now?

Gagnon: Yeah, what I like to call increasingly: the corporate–criminal syndicate. Yeah, the interlocking boards of directors and don’t forget the media corporations, the oil corporations. That what it is about.

Robles: Scary part is the media part for me. I mean, there is like a war going on journalists now and it is coming from all sides, even though we are Russian state media we sometimes feel it here.

Gagnon: When people get in power, they don’t like anybody knowing what they do. So no matter what country you are from, I think everybody understands that.

We in the US are working hard to create our own media, alternative media, so that is a big task that we all take on.

I do it, I have a TV show that plays on 14 stations across the State of Maine where I live. I have a daily blog that a lot of people read. And in fact some of my best readership I think is coming out of your show to be honest with you, because since I’ve been a couple of times on your show and I’ve been picking up all these readers on my blog from countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine.

Robles: Great.

Gagnon: It is amazing, you know. So I don’t know how else they would have heard about this show than maybe Voice of Russia. It’s pretty amazing.

Robles: Well, thank you. I’m glad that we are appreciated by somebody. Get a lot of comments like that from a lot of people who have very real and very important things to say, but US mass media doesn’t want to hear it. Bruce, anything else do you think we should get into?

Gagnon: All I can say is that all of us everywhere, in every country have to continue to demand the end of the militarization of the planet. Because we face one common enemy today, that is called climate change. What we saw recently happen in the Philippines, the severe weather that is happening everywhere on the planet today. It is getting worse every season.

Robles: But that is the elephant in the room: no one wants to talk about it. I know, we are losing islands, we are losing territory, we are losing hundreds of kilometers of land every day due to rising sea levels, but no one wants to talk about that.

Gagnon: My feeling is that we need to all be focused globally, all of us need to be focused on: stop wasting our money on militarism, on more weapons. We need to use that money to help us deal with this coming reality of climate change.

I mean, in my country we need a national rail system to get us out of our gas guzzling cars that help contribute to climate change. And so we continue to call for the conversion of the weapons productions system so that we can do something else, build something else, build rail, build solar, build a solar society, imagine putting solar devices on every house and business in the USA, imagine the jobs created doing that, imagine how much less oil we’d need when we do that.

So, the use of the kind of things that we all have got to demand if we are going to have a future for our children and our grandchildren. That’s what we need to be talking about.

The native Americans talked about every decision we make has to be based on the impact to the next seven generations. So all this money on star wars and space technology and space weapons technology – my country is leading the way.

China and the EU, and Russia, India think about the money that has been wasted on this incredibly stupid plan to militarize space.

That was the end of Part II of an interview with Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Thank you very much for listening and I wish you the best wherever you may be.

I agree Jerry. I mean what could be more obvious than a state of the art rail system for the USA?

I think he’s pretty much on the same page as Amory Lovins, and Lester Brown with Plan B. Why is it the people with most lucid vision and astonishing ideas are just dismissed as dreamers and fantasists?

David,
It seems those with the most lucid vision are rarely, if ever, seen on MSM, so people think if they aren’t on TV they are dreamers and fantasists. Your last sentence explains the epidemic of depression and pill popping. Thankfully more are becoming interested in new ideas and proposals. Perhaps keeping in our thoughts those who are suffering depression and other types of mental anguish through seeing the negative events on Earth,with empathy and compassion, will help to stimulate more interest in good ideas and real changes.
Thanks,
Jerry

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